Sol,

The Raven From Rome

Griffin had already moved past the second column and on to the third by the time I pried myself away from this first flawed ideal.

The scarlet marble of Selene’s soul was cool beneath my feet, free of any imperfections. No matter how much I tried to set the thought aside and focus on the actual lesson she was trying to teach me, I found myself comparing the pillar to the pure foundation and finding it lacking. It had no place here. It wouldn’t do her any good in the future, even I could tell that much.

So why was it here? Why had she been made to internalize such a flawed principle?

The second column was carved from onyx, the murals decorating its surface shimmering with a nearly liquid sheen. This column was much like the first in its composition, despite coming from a different source entirely. It had the same central band, the same scattered etchings of self-contained moments.

These little murals were more than twice as small as the ones carved into the first pillar. That central band—running all the way around—was the same size, but all the other murals were minuscule in comparison. Was it because the hands that carved them knew exactly how many they intended to squeeze into this pillar? Somehow, I doubted it.

Carved into the crown of the second pillar were the words φιλοσόφου πνεῦμα — The Philosopher’s Spirit. And once again at the base of the pillar, the onyx ideal:

[A wise man rides the wave.]

The little moments carved into this pillar were even more scattered and disconnected than the ones from the first. Those had been a confusing mess, but an overarching theme of nourishment had eventually suggested itself, hinted at by the story of the central band. Here, the harder I tried to find a thread that bound them all together, the more my head began to throb.

There were plenty of connections to be made, of course, but never one that united them all. I saw chiseled silhouettes of a man going about a thousand different tasks, pursuing a thousand different things. But the only thing that connected them all was their lack of connection to each other.

Following the central band around the pillar, I supposed it made sense. The story of this sophist’s ideal begins with a man beset by rivers and seas. The borders above and below are slow-moving currents. He ignores them, toiling away at the construction of a workshop.

In the next frame further along the band, the man is fully submerged in his work. The workshop has been built, and now he has turned all of his considerable enthusiasm towards his work. His workshop is filled to the brim with caged beasts, exotic pockets of nature harvested for his study, and piles upon piles of reference material: clay tablets, delicate sheafs of paper and rolls of papyrus, schematics drawn by his own hand, notes jotted down in their thousands.

There is a central design that begins to emerge as I progress further around the pillar. I watch him work with undiminished enthusiasm. I watched him suffer the setbacks inherent to all pursuits of this kind, stone walls of flawed reasoning that he can’t possibly break through, only go up and over or around. Yet through it all, the man radiated vitality. I could feel that rare thrill of creation, of breaking through, of discovering something monumental. I could practically see it seeping out of the stone.

And yet, as I made my way around the pillar, I saw the tide coming in.

At first, it was only a trickle, easily ignored by a man fully absorbed in his great work. Then it became a stream, flowing through the man's workshop and threatening to carry away his efforts with it.

In a frozen frame, the man diverted only just enough of his attention from his work to gather up the most important materials he still needed off the floor, so that the stream couldn’t carry them away. The failed attempts, ancillary notes, and all the references that he had so painstakingly gathered, were soaked through and carried away while he closed in on the breakthrough of his life.

In the next frame, the stream had turned into a torrent. The live specimens the man had captured were drowned in their cages. The current ran rapid through the workshop. The man was scrambling now, forced to step away from his work so he could salvage as much material as possible. Try to stem the flow. The workshop was still standing, if only just.

The twisted lines of chipped stone on the man’s face managed to convey a sense of shock—as if to say, after all this time, he had only just now realized the current was shifting at all.

The next frame showed the man reaching back for his great work, only to have it swept away by the raging river. His arms were full of a dozen different bits and bobs that had seemed crucial before, but now were all but worthless in comparison. The walls had come down. The ceiling had long since been carried away. The water was chest height.

In the next frame, the man was drowning.

His great work glittered at the bottom of the river. But it was too far for him to reach. Wasn’t it?

Above his head, the underside of a small ship could be seen gliding within his reach. The man was caught between the two, unwilling to decide.

The final frame showed the man racing along the current, riding that little ship to safety. He mourns the loss of his great work, yet he leans eagerly over the rail, exhilarated by the possibilities he could see on the horizon—just around the corner of the pillar.

I completed the circle and stared again at that first frame: a man filled with the passion of creation. Then I glanced back, to the abandoned work that had been positioned just so, so that the viewer might see it vanishing around the bend of the column, if they knew what they were looking for. Discarded at the precipice of completion, in pursuit of this new wonder, so that the new wonder could be abandoned in the pursuit of another one, further ‘round the bend.

[The wise man rides the wave.]

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I felt a sneer twist my lip.

Further off, Griffin spat over the edge of the platform in disgust, stalking away from the third column and moving on to the fourth.

We were of the same mind, then. These pillars weren’t just the product of other people. That would have been alarming enough, but this was far worse.

These principles weren’t worthy of a heroine.

The third pillar followed the trend of the first two. Its crown named it ‘The Philosopher’s Hunger’. The base revealed it to be an even more wretched ideal than the two that came before it. The next five were little better.

The hero’s reason, spirit, and hunger weren’t any more impressive than the philosopher’s. The tyrant’s, if anything, were even less.

“This is a disgrace,” Griffon said.

He turned away from the ninth pillar just as I was stepping back from the eighth.

“A tyrant for a father. A tyrant for a mentor. Eight wise women and a gadfly buzzing in your ear, and this is what they made of you. The full bounty of the Free Mediterranean at their fingertips, and this is what they gave you.”

His expression was thunderous - here, inside the heart, at least. Out in the waking world, he was smacking at my shoulder insistently, demanding I take out my lyre and play a tune for him to sing along to. The contrast would have been worth commenting on, if I wasn’t so disgusted.

I approached the ninth pillar with some dread. This would be the last of the tyrant’s set: The Tyrant’s Hunger.

The column was a squat, ugly thing, carved from slate by clumsy hands. The label on the crown was chiseled out in a jagged, sloppy script.

Wrapped around the pillar, the central band told the story.

A child slept soundly in his young mother’s arms.

The child woke up to an empty bed of roses.

The child ran frantically through the woods in search of his mother. The child became an adolescent, scouring the countryside in search of his mother. The adolescent had become a young man by the time he finally found his mother, buried in an unmarked grave—her bones broken up and ravaged by the roots of a withered old vine.

The young man dug deeper, unearthing another woman’s bones beneath his mother’s. And another. And another. The young man tore the vine out from the earth length-by-length, thorn-by-thorn. He tore trenches from the earth large enough to bury cities in, dug up the corpses of a thousand young mothers.

In the final frame of the cycle, the young man burned the vine and salted the ashes that remained.

My eyes slid grimly over the myriad disconnected murals outside the central band. They were all of them cruelties. I knew the name of this pillar in my gut, but I looked anyway.

[Root and stem.]

I grit my teeth and turned away from it.

Selene sat upon her honeycomb tripod, unphased by her brother’s outraged interrogation. She met my eyes over the top of his head and nodded toward the tenth and final pillar—the one that Griffon had skipped.

It was the ugliest of them all.

I couldn’t even guess what sort of stone it had been chiseled from, because from crown to base, the miserable thing was covered in an opaque crust of dried blood and offal. I paced a circle around it and couldn’t find a single clear spot.

I took the heel of my palm and dragged it across the crown. It did nothing but stain my skin. Resigning myself to it, I dug my nails into the muck instead, peeling finger-thick strips of unspeakable rot and grime away from the pillar of her soul. With a sinking feeling, I realized I hadn’t felt any stone beneath my nails.

I pulled more and more of it away, clawing through the grime until I began to suspect there was nothing of substance beneath the grime at all. The tenth pillar of Selene’s heart, the consolidating colonnade, last to come and most important, wasn’t even made of stone.

At some point, Griffin noticed my efforts. His eyes widened in disbelief at the vile effluvia trapped under my fingernails and piled up on the scarlet marble at my feet. It was enough to stop him mid-rant and draw him back across the platform.

Irony of ironies, the more livid he became in here, the more boisterous he grew out there. He’d woken the men up with his singing a while back, and now his shanty reached a fever pitch. My body dutifully strummed away at my ivory lyre, and I saw more than one skiff paddling our way across the Nile. Plastered to the peak of Olympus Mons and back, the fool somehow never missed a note. His voice was as sweet as it had ever been—maybe even a bit better than usual.

Inside the Total Eclipse of the Heart, his disgust and his outrage gave way to something far more murderous as he joined me, scraping fistfuls of waste away from his sister’s tenth pillar with both hands.

“The audacity of these fucking dogs,” he said quietly, almost to himself. His eyes were distant now. His tone was measured.

He pulled another rotten chunk of rot away from the crust and crushed it in his fist.

“They say the Tyrant Riot loved a good joke. Do you think he laughed about this one, Sol?”

“Maybe,” I said grimly, scraping deeper and deeper through. I’d reach the other end of it soon. At this rate, perhaps the whole thing would collapse. Maybe that would harm her. But she wasn’t telling either of us to stop—just watching us from atop her honeycomb tripod. Waiting patiently for us to learn our lesson.

“Do you think he’ll be laughing when I find him down in Tartarus?” Griffin asked me, conversationally now. “After I’ve turned him inside out and drowned him in the Styx?”

I hummed, a considering sound. “You know, he might.”

It exploded out of him then—a hateful, feral sound—and he drove his arm through the center of the pillar with all his strength.

I turned my head and raised a hand to block the explosion of grime that followed, but instead of that explosion, all I heard was a muffled thump, and then the sharp snap of fracturing bone. We both froze, looking first at each other, then back at the pillar.

More confused than hurt, Griffin jerked his arm out of the muck and twisted it back and forth to observe the bone that had broken and punched through the skin. The wound was caked in all manner of vile filth, maybe even enough to infect a constitution as robust as his. Assuming any of this translated to the waking world.

“There’s something in the center,” he said, puzzled. “It’s sturdier than stone.”

That was all that needed to be said.

With three arms between us, we peeled the filth away one layer at a time, working our way up and down the pillar until the waste was piled to our ankles. Up to our shins. Until finally, we reached the pillar.

And stared, silently, at its glittering surface.

Sapphire, ruby, amethyst, and gold. All of them. None of them. Brighter than all the precious gems of the earth combined, stronger than any man-made metal.

The tenth pillar, the consolidating column, was carved from unbreakable adamant.

I fell to one knee and scraped away the last of the muck around the base, probing with my fingers until I found the principle. It was rougher than it should have been. When I cleared the grime away, I saw that the plaque had been ground down and shaved away.

Whatever had been written there once was gone now.

A new label had been written in its place, with veins of glowing amethyst:

[This kills heart demons.]